Search Unity

Casual Connect Seattle – My trip report…

After a crazy week featuring not one but three separate events crammed into the span of one week I’m finally coming up for air and thought I’d take a minute to share some thoughts with y’all. The first of those events was the longest and most involved and that was last week’s Casual Connect Seattle conference.

I’ve been lucky enough to attend every Casual Connect conference in Seattle and without fail this year’s event was as awesome as ever. I’m quite impressed at the work done by the Casual Games Association as they’ve managed to expand this event from a few hundred or so in 2006 to something on the order of 2000 attendees as last week’s event, and they’ve done that while retaining the same cool vibe that makes it such a cool conference. I say that because the conference really does offer a great feel to it, it’s more like a community affair than some large anonymous bulk conference and it has such a great focus on the casual games business that it really speaks to the heart of most folks using (or that should be using) Unity.

Unfortunately I wasn’t lucky enough to get away from the table to attend any sessions but word on the “street” is that they were of course as valuable as ever. What I was lucky enough to enjoy was the incredible amount of traffic by our sponsor table and the wide range of meetings I was able to have with people from all backgrounds. What’s more is that we as a company noticed a very tangible shift in who was there asking about us. In years past most folks dropped by the booth with a “so, what’s Unity?” sort of approach, this year it was far more on the “I’ve heard of Unity and want to know more!” side, so they were intent and interested visitors to say the least!

All told we had an incredible time, we met with countless developers as well as a number of high-level strategic partners, and both of those groups will be extremely valuable in helping all of us push Unity even further in the coming weeks, months and years. I have to offer a big shout out to my fellow UT crew members that were there as they all worked hard and did a great job. On top of that I’ll offer another huge shout out to Luke Burtis of the Casual Games Association as he’s an incredible contact for us that’s managed to pull through on all accounts.

Thanks to our team, thanks to all the Unity users that were in the house, thanks to Luke and the Casual Games Association crew and of course thanks to everyone at the conference – that rocked!